


Harry Potter can't dance, does anyway.

by Imherepeasant



Series: Draco Malfoy Recovery [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Dancing, Eating Disorders, Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-25
Updated: 2017-02-25
Packaged: 2018-09-26 22:48:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9927560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Imherepeasant/pseuds/Imherepeasant
Summary: After his extreme weight loss and subsequent fall, Draco is getting better, but it's taking a long time.Harry likes to dance, Draco does not.





	

**Author's Note:**

> if you haven't read "Mending broken things" it gives a lot of the background info on where Draco is in his life, I would recommend you read that first.

Draco Malfoy doesn’t dance. Since he was a child he was shy, and in the presence of friends he never wanted to embarrass himself. Even at family birthday parties he stayed glued to the plushly upholstered seats of the Malfoy family home, resolutely still. His mother would start swaying after a few glasses of sherry, but his father would sit stiffly, disapprovingly. He glared at Draco every time he was invited out onto the floor by a tipsy aunt or an overzealous family friend. Eventually, Draco stopped wanting to get up, then he stopped attending these dinners. He sat upstairs in his room listening to dismal wizarding bands groaning about death, or the dreary orchestral shit Lucius permitted. You couldn’t dance to that if you wanted to, not counting waltzes. Draco couldn’t waltz, and didn’t want to learn. Nobody would teach him. Nobody was around to dance with. This wasn’t a problem- as Draco definitely didn’t dance. Ever. He’d never heard muggle music, dismissing it as dirty and inferior for years, until the war was over and his father was dead.   
Harry listened to it through little headphones, or on his computer. He sprawled out over their bed. They were meant to be sleeping separately, McGonagall had made it clear that any funny business was punishable by months of detentions. However, Draco’s bed was more of a formality, none of the other 8th years had snitched on the pair, as many of the coupled-up students were sharing beds too. Draco’s recovery was helped by healthy amounts of sleep, he was finally getting these now that he slept with his head in Harry’s neck every night.

Even after he came out and started dating Harry and started gaining weight, the residual fingerprints of his father prevented Draco from joining in with 8th year parties and pub crawls and sing-alongs. The happiness was seeping into every other survivor, the colour leaking back into people’s lives, like Luna’s gorgeously bright watercolours on a wet page. She gives him the gorgeous creations, sometimes when they’re still a little wet. Draco levitates them to hang over his bed, like a canopy. They’re often of the castle, or of flowers, but most of the time the paintings don’t depict anything at all, Luna just laughs delightedly as she flings paint onto a page with her hands. She comes back from her easel with blues and pinks and yellows strewn all the way up to her elbows. Hermione uses cleansing spells to magic away the mess, but Neville takes her sticky hands in his and washes it away manually, they spend hours stood together over water fountains and old-fashioned sinks, watching the colour drift away in Hogwarts’ clear water.   
Ron and Hermione have a new dynamic now, they still love Harry, the three of them still go out for drinks or on little adventures, but they’re decidedly a twosome now. Ron has taught Hermione to play chess properly. She is not very good at it, and frequently curses or flips the board, much to Ron’s distress. Most of them drink now, Neville and Harry found a barrel of firewhisky under Professor Sprout’s favourite chair in greenhouse two, beneath a suspiciously wobbly flagstone. Draco doesn’t drink anymore, not since he tried to hurt himself. When everyone else settles in for a pint and a chat, Draco sits quietly next to Harry, or in Harry’s lap, or under Harry’s lolling head as the drinking songs echo around the room of requirement. He doesn’t attend any school balls-feigning illness or residual fatigue from his emaciation. He escapes up to the olwery or the astronomy tower, he slinks to the back of hall or has baths with lavender salts. Harry joins him in the hot water now, helps him in and out, washes his hair, curls him up in fluffy towels afterwards. There’s no sex, not yet. They've come close, sometimes kisses get a little too heated, or Draco will let his hands wander too far south, but they always stop before anything more can happen, Draco’s still weak. He doesn’t faint so much anymore, but he still bruises like a Snargaluf pod and he’s broken two toes, his left wrist and his collarbone in the past few months. Harry won’t risk hurting him. Sex is out of the question for now. They stay in bed all day sometimes, or spend weekends at Grimmauld Place, drinking tea and talking all night. They have long lavender baths in the prefect’s bathroom, or lounge about in underwear catching up on all the years they'd missed. Despite all the intimacy, Draco never wanted to listen to Harry's music. No matter how many times Harry offered, he was always turned down gently. It was all music his parents liked, or he'd grabbed onto during the horrible years he'd lived with the wretched Dursleys. This music was Harry's entire childhood, all he'd had. It seemed too private and personal, to infringe upon Harry’s reams of tape recordings and CDs. Draco always answered with “No. Thank you, though” and left to make tea.

When Harry came back to Hogwarts on a Saturday afternoon from a muggle charity shop with two levitating cardboard boxes full of dusty looking “records” everyone but Draco sprang up in joy and fawned over the old tracks.  
“It’s muggle music, Draco!” Lilted Luna. “Even pureblood wizards have heard most of this.”  
Draco was surprised at first that Muggles had music too. Harry had unearthed a large turntable from Grimmauld place the first time he took Draco there. Sirius’ most likely, unless Lupin had left it there before the first war. Harry hauled it open now, the students crowded Harry as he set the funny black disk down and positioned a lever on top of it. 

It was disco. Of course Draco Malfoy didn’t know what disco was, or that Harry Potter loved it. Ron groaned, Hermione rolled her eyes, and everyone started dancing. Luna and Neville had some odd arrangement going on, in which she span with her arms stretched out, head flung back smiling. Neville stood next to her clapping her on and laughing. Hermione knew this music well, and sang along with a massive grin on her face, her Hogwarts uniform skirt (that she wasn’t required to wear any more) billowing out around her as she jumped about. Ron laughed alongside her and spat an orb of light to the top of the high ceiling using his deluminator, it glowed and span gently, casting soft spots of light over the floor below. Harry was a terrible dancer, but that didn’t stop him from throwing limbs in every direction and practically leaping into each step. 

“Draco?” Harry took Draco’s hand, to pull him into a dance, but Draco shrugged him off and raised his voice above the music  
“I don’t dance. I can’t.”  
Harry nodded suspiciously, then broke open into a smile  
“I’ll teach you! Come on!”  
“No. Thank you.” Draco turned curtly and left the room, heading straight up to the astronomy tower.

He didn’t like being isolated, but no matter how welcoming everyone was to him, Draco was still quiet, still reserved, still easily tired and weak. Even if he had known how to dance, it was unlikely that he’d have the strength to do so for long- he was still an outsider, still “other”.  
Harry’s hurried footsteps clapped up the winding staircase behind Draco, with more energy than Draco could fathom, Harry was at the top of the steps in half the time it had taken Draco, and he wasn’t even panting.  
“Draco, what happened? What’s wrong?” He came forward and looped his arms around Draco’s waist, spreading his wide hands over the slowly thickening muscle of Draco’s ribs, the bones were sinking gradually, and there was a blush in Draco’s cheeks-he was already so much healthier than when he and Harry had started dating.  
“I can’t dance.”  
Harry didn’t understand why this was such a problem.  
“I can teach you, I said so before.”  
Draco sighed in frustration.  
“No,” he clarified “I can't dance, I never learned, but I mean I physically cannot dance, I’ve starved myself half to death and now I’m getting better but I'm still so tired and I can’t dance. Or run. Or be intimate with you.”  
Suddenly Draco was off of his feet and his legs were wrapped around Harry’s waist. He was turning the two of them in a slow circle.  
“We’re going to have every opportunity, Draco. You’re going to be well, and everyone else will be safe, and we’ll be able to do everything you want to do. We can go for runs and we’ll dance and we’ll spend hours and hours “being intimate” with each other and we’ll move to Grimmauld Place or we can find somewhere else to live and it’ll be beautiful. But,” He paused, smiling sadly and resting his chin on Draco’s shoulder. “Not until you’re better, and you can’t rush that. You’re doing exactly the right thing, Draco. Just heal.”  
Draco scowled and started touching Harry’s messy hair, it was much longer now, a slightly awkward length at the back of his neck.  
“I don’t like the waiting. I want to be better now.”  
Harry nodded. He knew.

They didn’t go back down to the dancing that afternoon. There would be plenty of other Saturday nights where Draco would venture out into the music and start to enjoy his own body again, but for tonight, they left the other students to laugh and drink and make happier memories than they'd had in that room before. Draco continued to be carried by Harry in a slow circle, until they’d run out of ways to say “I love you” and Harry carried Draco to bed.


End file.
